Tuesday, October 13. 2015

Twenty-two years after the US marketing of Prozac, which changed the marketing, prescribing and widespread consumption of psychoactive drugs, a meta-analysis of six large studies published in the Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA) confirms that industry’s blockbuster drugs, SSRI antidepressants were unable to outperform placebos for moderate symptoms of depression. Just like the older, much cheaper tricyclic antidepressants, SSRIs show a clinical value only for the severely depressed i.e. clinically dysfunctional patients.

In other words, antidepressants are worthless for most of the people for whom they are prescribed.

The NYTimes adds to the end of the report "many studies that were not initially published, or were buried, showed no significant benefits compared with placebos."

Dr Erick Turner, whose earlier study "Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy," in The New England Journal of Medicine, 2008 caused a stir among industry’s stakeholders, also avoided the inescapable conclusion, given the finding that placebos performed just as well as antidepressants without any adverse side-effects:

The full magnitude of severe harm produced by these drugs in otherwise healthy people for whom antidepressants were misprescribed has not yet been fully collated–the human casualties include thousands of drug-induced suicides, mania, drug-exacerbated depression, drug dependence, birth defects…....."

"My road to hell was paved with Xanax (and Klonopin, and Ativan, and Halcion)
The pills were a release from my crushing anxiety. But the more I took, the more I struggled with a new pain
Ashley Zlatopolsky"
via Doctor M. Amir
in Mental illness
at
09:19